In a short new book about Bradley Manning, journalist and civil rights lawyer Chase Madar necessarily and appropriately looks beyond the figure of Manning himself to ask how we understand information, how we perceive our relationship to state authority, and how people who serve the armed power of the state see their own place in its project. Writing from what often seems to be a leftist perspective, Madar nevertheless builds on a deeply conservative explanatory foundation in which political illnesses have cultural causes.

“The United States is an increasingly depoliticized society,” he writes, “and we struggle to comprehend the very concept of the political.” Our most urgent problem lies not in the nature of government but in the failures of civil society. The pathologies of empire and the national-security state grow from our own pathologies of thought and speech. This approach is familiar: it’s a republic if you can keep it, and we apparently can’t.

Madar is most successful at two points. First, he places Manning’s attempt to explain himself against the explicatory efforts of an exhaustingly banal news media. In chat sessions with a stranger on the Internet who (shockingly enough) turned out to be an FBI snitch, Manning is said to have written that he wanted to share “the non-PR versions of world events and crises” with his fellow citizens. Information, he wrote, “should be a public good,” allowing people to assess state action with something more than the information the state chooses to provide. Like Madar, Manning appears to have blended the premises of the left and the right, promising to reveal “how the first world exploits the third” in very nearly the same breath with which he compared his own alleged leaks to the release of the Climategate emails. However it varies in theme and perspective, though, Manning’s discussion focuses on state power and public engagement: what is government doing, and what do we know about it?

“The intel analyst’s intent is conscious, coherent, historically informed and above all it is political,” Madar concludes. Manning is alleged to have leaked to an organization that “quotes Madison and the Federalist Papers” in its mission statement. The people behind Wikileaks, Madar writes, “are, essentially, eighteenth-century liberals who are good with computers.” Pulling at the masks that cover neoconservative and neoliberal foreign policy, Manning seems to have been engaged in a small-r republican project, looking for ways to give informed citizens the knowledge to restrain state power.

News coverage of Manning’s alleged leaks, on the other hand, shoved aside politics to focus on the young soldier’s homosexuality and the fact that he had sought gender-identity counseling. The explanation for Manning’s actions was steered into a few permissible channels: sexual, emotional, psychiatric, pharmacological. This guy leaked information that brings the projects of state power into question—what caused him to go crazy like that? Was it a boyfriend thing?

Second, Madar cogently examines the culture of unchecked government secrecy. There’s something vaguely Soviet about the American security state these days, a familiar sense that the surreptitious and the pathetic are one in the same. In 1991, Madar writes, the federal government classified six million documents; in 2010, it classified 77 million. The rapid growth of secrecy matches the rapid growth in bad ideas and administrative incompetence, as overclassification protects “the delicate ego of the foreign policy elite, whose performance in the past decade has been so lethally sub-par.”

The phrase at the end of that sentence is my favorite moment in the book. Nor is it only in foreign policy that our political elites are implicated in this lethal mediocrity. The worse they get, the more they hide.

Examining at some length the material Manning is alleged to have leaked, Madar compares the claimed harm and the known harm from several leading examples. A classified list of “vital strategic interests” compiled by the State Department reveals such sensitive information as the fact that the Strait of Gibraltar is “a vital shipping lane” and that the Congo is “rich in mineral wealth.” Secrets like these, he writes, may as well have been “tabulated by a reasonably capable undergraduate intern” but their release prompted agonized howling from government spokesmen. “Have we in America become so infantalized that tidbits of basic geography must now be state secrets?” Madar asks. “Maybe better to leave that question unanswered.”

The secrecy isn’t exactly secrecy, though. A government that increasingly targets leakers and whistleblowers from its lower and middle ranks is the same government that leaks constantly from the top. But the difference is in the use of those leaks, as senior officials shape political perception by the process of control. Leaks are okay, as long as they serve the interests of power; “when official Washington decides to leak, the law fades away.” Again, the taste is faintly Soviet, and Madar correctly describes the effect of metastasizing classification in a government that also freely hands out secret information when it serves state purposes. “If a rule is selectively only enforced it ceases to be a rule and becomes something else—an arbitrary instrument of authority, a weapon of the powerful—but not a rule.” If anything, Madar is being too polite on this point.

Covering a series of topics—a brief history of whistleblowing, secrecy, and the rule of law; Manning’s personal background; the scope and nature of the leaked information—Madar falls significantly short in only one area of analysis. Discussing Manning’s pre-trial detention, many months of which took place in absurdly punitive solitary confinement, Madar allows that “after a decade, the ‘excesses’ of the War on Terror may have seeped into our domestic justice systems.” But he quickly pronounces this understanding of Manning’s treatment to be “incomplete,” moving on to a chapter that looks at the record of solitary confinement and disciplinary brutality in domestic prisons. “On the whole,” he concludes, “the GWOT has been all-American.” Military prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Field are just Pelican Bay and the federal “supermax” cellblock picked up and planted overseas, and Manning was caught in that same model of incarceration. Prisoners at San Quentin would recognize Abu Ghraib; our domestic model of prison brutality is our model of prison brutality abroad.

But it seems to me that the premises of war and threatened security lie deeply at the roots of that model, as increasingly harsh domestic confinement has grown up alongside the rapidly expanding national-security state. War is the health of the state, but that increasingly vigorous state doesn’t fall asleep at the edge of the battlefield. The legal historian Nasser Hussain has usefully described the “jurisprudence of emergency” in the British empire (and in the postcolonial states it left behind). Closer to home, Alfred McCoy has described American counterinsurgency in the Philippines as a site of origin for the 20th-century American surveillance state. At the very least, each feeds the other; domestic power and foreign aggression blend together, sharing sources and outcomes.

But Madar is finally successful at opening a discussion that needs to be opened. The war over government secrecy is fully joined. Darrell Issa is living on leaks from the Justice Department in the “Fast and Furious” scandal, for which Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s family must feel nothing but gratitude. The Food and Drug Administration has been spying on its own scientists in an effort to catch and punish internal critics. And the Obama administration, that great fountain of transparency and good government, is pursuing criminal charges against more whistleblowers than every previous administration combined. As government tries to pull itself down the rabbit hole, its success is unlikely to be prevented by a supine press, especially if Obama is re-elected. Whatever victories we may have against a political elite that wishes to free itself from the restraint of the society it seeks to control will come from a culture of shared republican values. And they will come from a genuine freedom of information.

“If we hope to know what our government is so busily doing all over the world, massive leaks from insider whistleblowers are, like it or not, the only recourse,” Madar concludes. We need Bradley Manning.

OK, there is too much in the way of secrecy. Got that. So… Manning did not release any of the information that is alleged to have put at risk the lives of those working with the US in Iraq and Afghanistan? This information came from another source? His motivation (allegedly anger at DADT) is irrelevant? Sorry, I don’t buy it. As the mother and aunt of former Marines who served in the Philippines and Afghanistan, I don’t want Manning (or anyone else) to make public information which may harm our service members or their allies. Indiscriminate release of classified information is as bad as indiscriminately classifying information and can cause more direct harm to human beings who are American citizens and allies.

Everything the government does is a big secret. When our politicians (and corporate media) are not lying to us they are concealing the truth. This is not government by consent of the governed. Manning honors his oath to defend the Constitution. Obama does not.

If our government convinces us we need to go to war by lying to us don’t we need to know this since it is our sons and daughters that will fight and die. Does that make our leaders war criminals? Once again the government “uses” the troops to justify their punishment of dissenters. The only harm Manning did was to embarrass our unethical leaders. Manning will never be tried on the facts but on the fear that he caused the death of an unnamed person that never exsisted.

I have trouble buying the argument that open knowledge of our government’s crimes is a threat to national security and therefore should be secret. Better to not commit the crimes. The families of the victims of those crimes know who the guilty party is. They knew it the minute the drone opened fire or the A-10 launched a missile. Manning isn’t telling them anything they don’t already know. What Manning (allegedly) did was tell everyone else about those crimes. Such knowledge may lead to accountabilty. The offical policy of crime with impunity is thus endangered. I would have thought conservatives would be among Manning’s strongest supporters. But I must be thinking of the old conservatives who valued democracy, transparency and accountabilty. Not the new conservatives…who act like willing accomplices in constructing fascism.

The “Arab Spring” came about by Muslim Brotherhood imams inflaming their congregations in various Muslim states with the WikiLeaks confidential revelations of their natonal leaders conspiring with the leaders of the hated Israelis and Americans against Mohammed and Allah. Muslim states directly or indirectly controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood and states like Saudi Arabia which have been funding the Muslim Brotherhood and other Muslim jihadist groups were not included in the WikiLeaks revelations. Young Bradley Manning is being charged with sending those confidential reports to WikiLeaks, but the government has “Need-to-know” control over all classified documents: if you have no need to know the contents, you can’t get access. Even if Manning HAD access – which he did not, how would he have known which documents to exclude, and when would he have had the time to review and exclude the information about Brotherhood-friendly Muslim national leaders? Why has there been no call to find those who fed Manning the carefully-selected documents for release to WikiLeaks?

Manning was a shady little prat who put people’s lives in danger, and he did not do it out of some sense of patriotism or nobility or anything like that. It was a temper tantrum and maybe some pay for play only — he did it for himself. And he did put quite a lot of people in danger (may have gotten some — and their families, remember that) killed (very brutally)– that should always be kept in mind.
Also, he wasn’t selective — he document dumped; the folks he gave the info to have been selective — and he had a fairly high security clearance (he was 35F; they all have pretty high clearance — now, the military does have a problem with dropping the ball there, that probably needs to be investigated).

Flush out your heads; this isn’t the hero you’re looking for — defending him makes you look bad, really bad.

By the way, if he was really a whistleblower, there probably would have been more whistleblow-y stuff, don’t you think? Rather than intel on foreign information sources and troop movements?

@PW
So whose lives have been endangered by Bradley Manning’s actions? Rather than just claim that it *must* be true, let’s hear you provide some citations and verifiable factual examples.

As for “whistleblow-y stuff”, how about Wikileaks revelation that DOD contractor Dyncorp had been procuring boy prostitutes for parties in Afghanistan, and that the Afghan Minister of Interior asked the US ambassador to suppress media reports about it? Is that “whistleblow-y” enough for you? In the cable, the Afghan minister is quoted as saying that if the news media got a hold of the child sex trafficking story then lives would be in danger — Perhaps those are the lives you were talking about?
If you have any doubt about the nature of the issue, here is a [painful to watch] investigation by Frontline about the sexual trafficking of boys in Afghanistan.

Why was there no evidence of official investigation or prosecution? One could guess that it is be because the US govt doesn’t want anything coming out of Wikileaks to be perceived as legitimate.

Maybe I am not understanding the nature of our enemies/technology. But, how would our enemies get the information if Bradley did indeed put it up, they would have to do the research and find it..

and in many case that alone would compromise THEIR positions, how the hell do you get internet without

Also, it goes deeper then that, a football coach of mine had said that our tactic should be soo good he should be able to tell the coach of the other team our next five plays and we should still be able to execute the

So, giving you the benefit of the doubt, not only do we have to ask if our enemies got the hold of the information. But if they were to do anything useful with the information

@PW
This is simply amazing…it’s not the doing that is wrong, but rather the telling of it.

I may murder my neighbor for some advantage, but I then have the right to rise up and demand that no one can inform anyone in my community because doing so may cause harm to my children?

What has happened to our good sense? How can we be so foolish as to turn our anger and retribution upon the messenger, while we completely ignore what he has told us? If the telling is a crime, what do you call the actions he reported?

How can you manage to convince a normal person that the murder itself is irrelevant but the telling of it is immoral?

And as quite reasonably noted above by Steve W, the people directly affected by our immoral and illegal actions probably already know we were the ones who did it, so who are we really trying to hide this from? Duh, us of course.

If it’s wrong to kill people without a fair trial in America, why is it okay for us to kill people in other countries without a fair trial? If child sexual exploitation is wrong in America, why is it okay for us to involve ourselves in it in other countries? If I can’t take your grown children and torture them into confessions, why can I take other people’s children and torture them?

It has to be the saddest thing in the world to destroy freedom to protect Freedom; to eliminate liberty to protect Liberty, and to trample on rights to protect Rights. Wasn’t this a big theme of George Orwell’s famous book? Didn’t we all have to read it in HS, or at least watch the movie?

If you fight monsters with evil deeds, you become a monster, right? How does this help the problem of monsters?